Spring Rubber

New OCM Michael Estime made his debut on America's Weather Now tonight, filling in for Nick Kosir. https://www.foxweather.com/person/e/michael-estime I'm not sure what the "FAST" weather service is that's mentioned in his bio. Can't find anything online about it either. Perhaps it's some new product that's about to launch? Edit: Oh, apparently "FAST" just stands for "Free, ad-supported streaming television" - so in other words, just the main live streaming network. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220608005888/en/FOX-Weather-Signs-Meteorologist-Michael-Estime

Given that it's just internal talk at the moment, I suppose it's too early to tell what exactly might happen. Sounds like the possibilities are wide open at this point. Whatever the arrangement might be after October 2024, I assume it ought to launch with a heavy streaming component.

At least they are preempting today's Pattrn rerun due to the severe weather threat. Going forward, I hope they continue to adjust situationally and air live weather at this time when weather conditions merit.

Effective today, TWC has permanently moved the rerun of Pattrn from 1pm ET to 4pm ET. Are they STUPID? The 4pm ET hour is typically when severe weather starts to explode on any given day, and now they're going to remove most live weather coverage from that hour. Unreal.

"Oh sorry, the news isn't happening during our regular news programming schedule, so we're not covering it." lol

Fox Weather has been experimenting with completely dumping long-form from their weekend afternoon/evening schedule. After doing their preemption for PTC One last Saturday, programming last Sunday and both Saturday and Sunday this weekend has consisted solely of the "Fox Weather LIVE" automated loop of weather maps throughout the entirety of weekend afternoons and evenings. Edit: Looks like they're still doing long form on Sundays after 8pm ET. I suppose it's a sensible time for that sort of programming.

I noticed that, too. This helps to bring the Fox Weather logo back in line with the position of the lower thirds. The logo was lined up with the lower thirds in the first few months of the network, and then over the winter, they added the lower display line with weather forecasts for cities nationwide. After that point, the logo hadn't been aligned with the L3s for the past few months. By moving the live bug beneath the logo, everything is aligned again.

Not too impressed. On both the weather graphics and on the open, the text seems to just get lost into the background. This is what happens when you use plain white text with no outline / no drop shadow on a busy background.

They just interspersed about 3 minutes of live coverage from WSVN into their coverage. Pleasantly surprised to see them taking video from a non-O&O. Thanks for going the extra mile to look up the model of TV. Yeah, that TV is laughable. Haven't seen them use it since yesterday afternoon. Maybe they realized how bad it looked on the air and are now rethinking their purchase.

Thank you for the updates. I noticed that Tevin's been gone for a while. I wonder if maybe this was even a planned move for a while. When each show had their "cover images" put onto my on-screen guide a few months ago, Tevin was excluded from the Storm Center cover image; while every other show had their OCMs added to the cover images.

Welp, that's unfortunate timing. Hope everyone gets better soon, and hope it doesn't continue to spread throughout the broadcast team.

Solid move. We all need less fake "Breaking News" in our lives.

Taking a page out of TWC's book of what they do in the day(s) leading up to a tropical landfall, Steve Bender is co-hosting America's Weather Center from the field today in Miami. For whatever reason, he took the creative liberty of standing next to his own live program monitor. Ah ok, so the monitor was intended to be used for weather maps, and perhaps they had the monitor set to the wrong source in the opening segment. Either way, the monitor is still kinda dark out there in the bright sun.

This is exactly what I expected in terms of hires. Sharkey leaving WFLD at the same time Magiera left WGN made it all-too-obvious. What I didn't expect was WGN taking a WMAQ-style approach to just having any sports anchor appear on any given night. I figured they would go with assigned roles right out of the gate. I would assume they'll have defined roles before November sweeps, but hey, you never know.

They just started their live coverage at 5pm ET, and they're already advertising in the corner of the screen that they have long form scheduled to resume at 8pm ET. Guess what time the severe storms are expected to really flare up in earnest? Right around 8pm-9pm ET. Update: around 5:22pm ET, they got rid of the long form advertisement and changed it to "All Evening - Severe Threat - LIVE Coverage". So we'll see... Update: TWC dropped coverage at 9pm ET. So much for their "All evening" coverage. I guess it depends how you define evening.

Because TWC loves inconsistency (or because they're reading our thread ), they have decided to have special severe weather live coverage today starting at 5pm ET. Interestingly, at the time they committed to this, the risk areas were 5% tornado and 30% hatched for wind and hail. Since then, the SPC upgraded the tornado risk to a 10% non-hatched area. This is definitely lower than the threshold that TWC has been using for their criteria to extend live coverage on a weekend for many years, especially considering today's events are transpiring in the plains, not their beloved northeast. Glad to see them giving some attention to severe weather in the plains on a weekend for a change.

I agree; the selloff of weather.com, mobile assets, and forecasting technology to IBM was a huge detriment to the TV network. Now they basically don't have a leg to stand on in the digital and streaming age. The Milwaukee headend has a Star where the ad ticker is for the Cleveland area? Are there any videos of it?

They did stuff throughout both the 9 and 10pm newscasts, but yeah, they did the big final farewell during GN Sports. Ray, Micah, and Tom re-joined Dan and Jarrett at the desk during GN Sports, also bringing in Rich King, Josh Frydman, and many others. For the very final segment, the on-air staff left the desk, instead having Dan sit at the desk surrounded by his family while Dan delivered his final remarks. They wound up staying live over their timeslot, ending the show at 11:01pm. Dan did remark that they have hired their new sports anchor, but they can't announce it yet. He said the announcement should happen next week.

Yikes, sad to know that you have to fear for your life just doing a field report in your own city.

I'm curious to see how WGN will handle Dan Roan's goodbye tonight. I know they've still been enforcing social distancing in the studio. I wonder if they'll lift those restrictions a bit in order for the anchors and crew to give him a proper goodbye. I'm also curious if they would do two separate goodbyes - one at the end of the 10pm news and one at the end of GN Sports - or if they'll just do a single goodbye.

Someone's gotta do it!

Ah ok, so there's absolutely no additional live studio programming in times of severe weather compared to the cable/satellite TV channel then, eh?

I wholeheartedly agree with you. They need to adjust their live coverage hours dynamically based on the circumstances, not solely basing everything on SPC outlooks that are issued 18-36 hours before the event. On TWC in the 90s and 2000s, they used to have shifts that were produced using one OCM and one person in the master control room pressing the buttons to run the show. It wasn't pretty, but it functioned. Automation technology has greatly advanced these days to where you can run a reasonable-quality broadcast with one or two people in the control room and one OCM in front of the camera. We've seen many nights where Carl Parker, Ray Stagich, or Mark Thibodeau break into long form programming every so often for only 30-60 seconds at a time. If they can do those short solo-hosted break-ins, why can't they stay live for longer periods of time when it really matters? What kind of extended coverage do they provide on their streaming platform? Is it hosted by OCMs, or is it automated weather maps/radar?

My guess is that this is a reaction to the fact that the SPC's 1am CT outlook today had a 10% hatched area for tornado risk, which SPC walked back as of the 8am CT update and moved it back down to a 5% risk area. TWC's decisions on pre-emptions this year seem to be based on hatched tornado risk areas. If there's a hatched tornado risk; they'll pre-empt, but if there's not a hatched tornado risk area, they don't pre-empt. The tornado risk areas last week that they refused to pre-empt programming for were standard 10% risk areas without the hatched area. IMO, those should be taken as seriously as a 10% hatched area, specially like last Thursday when there was a huge 45% hatched straight-line wind risk, but TWC hates covering straight-line wind events because it's not as dramatic as tornado coverage.

On StreamTWC.com, it says that you can watch for free if you already have TWC through a cable or satellite subscription, so my understanding is that the paid service is for users who don't already have a cable or satellite subscription?